SNR Improvement by Photon Noise Filtering in Ocean Color Monitor Satellite Images

In high radiometric resolution electro optical image payloads of remote sensing satellites, photon noise dominates SNR performance. Photon noise is input signal dependent and difficult to filter. This paper proposes a photon noise filtering technique for Ocean Color Monitor (OCM) images. Existing filtering techniques are meant for object detection and handles images with poor SNR. As OCM SNR is on higher side, custom sigma filter based denoising technique is developed. Proposed technique first converts photon noise to signal independent Gaussian noise. For this variance stabilization, Anscombe transform is used. Simulations are carried on various images. Proposed technique provides 2050% reduction in overall as well count-wise RMSE. FFT analysis shows significant reduction in noise. Proposed technique is of low complexity.